Hiring Framework
Assessing cultural fit. Should recruiters do it? Everything you need to know
S. Connie
Published on 17th November, 2022
6 min
The term company culture has skyrocketed in recent years. But is it important?
According to PwC's 2021 Global Culture Survey, 72% of 3,200 C-level executives believe culture boosts business performance and success.
Deloitte found that 83% of executives believe that engaged employees are critical to success, that culture is critical to engagement, and that businesses that proactively manage culture produce 516% higher growth.
Assessing cultural fit is mutually beneficial for businesses and employees, as employees care deeply about a company’s culture.
This is a guide to assessing cultural fit.
The benefits of assessing cultural fit
Culture is not especially easy to define. In a business context, it amounts to a mix of business practices, activities, communication methods, and industry/sector factors.
While some businesses naturally lend themselves to a specific culture, e.g. a bank or financial institution tends to be more corporate in culture, more businesses are differentiating their culture with events, benefit schemes, continued professional development and other offerings.
Cultural fit benefits both the business and employees. Building a strong, cohesive company culture makes employees more likely to:
- Care about business outcomes
- Communicate proactively
- Engage with the business proactively, including in their self-development
- Feel optimistic about their impact
- Immerse themselves in business activities
- Understand and connect to the business
The drawbacks of assessing cultural fit
Assessing for cultural fit cannot risk discrimination or prejudice, and businesses can’t be idealistic.
Aligning employees with the business’s culture benefits both parties and should be seen as a mutually beneficial practice.
Critically, cultural assessments shouldn’t create unconscious bias. Pigeon-holing individuals into different cultural practices is risky. For example, declining individuals based on abstract cultural notions, e.g., “they’re too casual” or “they’re too corporate,” is detrimental and possibly amounts to bias.
It’s essential to ask the right questions. These are sometimes called “value-based questions,” which help employers discover values rather than provoking canned responses.
A good value-based question isn’t loaded, nor does it provoke an answer that is influenced by one’s background.
Instead, these questions aim to get to the bottom of principles such as openness, honesty, transparency, proactivity, pragmatism, kindness and cooperation. Read our post on interview questions here.
How to assess cultural fit
Assessing cultural fit is a challenging task, not certainly not impossible.
There’s no real objective way to measure cultural fit, and human judgement is open to bias. So it’s imperative to have a robust cultural assessment strategy supported by modern recruitment software like Hiringmaster.
Hiring staff should discuss company culture openly, and everyone should have their opinions heard. Here are five things to consider:
1: Refine your ads
Recruiters should consider cultural fit from the very start. Candidates will begin judging culture from the moment they read an ad and apply for the job.
By refining ads, recruiters can simplify the process of assessing cultural fit - they’ll act as a cultural pre-filter. However, avoiding gender-coded words and other forms of conscious bias in ads is crucial. So, while they should evoke something that appeals to the best candidates, they shouldn’t assume too much of their audience.
If you’re looking for some inspiration for writing superb job ads, check out our post here.
2: Streamline the hiring process
A slick, streamlined hiring process simplifies the process of screening candidates. Candidates benefit from a quick and well-communicated candidate experience.
This also informs candidates that the business cares about recruitment and has a strong team of capable individuals managing the recruitment process, which gives the right impression.
Hiringmaster contains numerous features for accelerating the hiring process, enabling businesses to communicate values of competency, efficiency and communication. The business must embody the values it seeks to discover in candidates. If cultural statements are not backed up with actions, candidates will see through them.
Boost productivity while saving time and money
4 fundamental principles to eliminate inefficiencies from the recruitment process.
3: Ask the right questions
Value-based questions target four culture-critical areas:
- Integrity and trust
- Collaboration
- Responsibility
- Goals and ambition
We’ve created a guide to value-based culture fit interview questions here, which includes some do’s and don’ts for crafting your own questions.
4: Recruitment education
Cultural fit is assessed in the recruitment phase, so hiring staff must be informed and aligned with company culture.
If hiring managers are misaligned or uninformed of company culture, they’re less likely to select culturally aligned candidates.
Many businesses create a list of cultural values; you can see Buffer’s list here. Inform recruiters of these principles to ensure they can best assess candidates for cultural fit.
Keep values at the forefront of the recruitment process - recruitment software like Hiringmaster allows recruitment teams to store company values for reference throughout the recruitment process.
5: Avoid mirror image hiring
Recognising that cultural fit isn’t about creating a clique is important. Recruiters mustn’t hire individuals who align with their own personalities under the guise of them being a good “cultural fit”.
This is sometimes called ‘mirror image hiring’, where recruiters choose those who resonate with themselves personally rather than the business.
Richard Boyd, Associate Director at Robert Walters, says, “Employers should not assume that finding someone who is a good cultural fit simply means recruiting professionals who are similar to their current staff. Finding new candidates who are a great cultural fit does not mean sacrificing diversity, but rather finding professionals from a range of backgrounds who share the values of your organisation.”
Summary: Assessing cultural fit. Should recruiters do it? Everything you need to know
Creating a strong company culture is essential for growth and success, and that starts with recruitment.
While screening for cultural fit is important, it’s a delicate task that requires hiring staff to be aware of potential bias. It isn’t an excuse to pick and choose personality traits.
Rather, cultural fit goes beneath the person to understand their honesty, transparency, cooperation and other universal values that aren’t affected by one’s background.
Levelling up your recruitment pipeline is the first step towards recruiting the top talent required to fuel growth. Hiringmaster provides a suite of recruitment tools that enable businesses to illustrate their cultural strengths while assessing candidates’ cultural fit.Get started for free, today
Contents
- The benefits of assessing cultural fit
- The drawbacks of assessing cultural fit
- How to assess cultural fit
- Summary: Assessing cultural fit. Should recruiters do it? Everything you need to know
